Free, Simple & Effective Social Media Tips From A Social Media Professional

As someone who spendsat least 3 hours of each day on various social media channels whether it’s for work, my own blog or freelance projects, then I think it’s fair to say I know a thing or two about how social media can be used to it’s potential. I’d never call myself an “expert” because social media changes every day from new features within the platforms to changing trends. However, you don’tneed to be an expert to get good results from social media, you just need to start implementing a few tried and tested tactics and you’ll soon start to notice an improvement.

Whether you’re a business, a blogger or just someone looking to improve their own personal social media accounts, start following these tips and you’ll see a big increase in both engagement with your posts and your follower/like count. And you don’t even have to spend any money!

1 . Never ignore your fans! Always respond.

I can’t stress enough the importance of getting back to someone who makes an effort to comment on your social media posts, or even mention you in a post. Even if they’ve not asked a question or have just said something simple like “this is great!”, it’s still really important you get back to them – and within a timely manner too. People like to feel appreciated, and even online there is a social etiquette.

And it’s not just those who comment to look out for – notice those who are retweeting or sharing your posts a lot and thank them for it. Even if it’s just by engaging with one of their posts as a thank you, making that effort to notice them makes them feel appreciated and will encourage them to engage with your social media more (and likely follow you if they weren’t already).

You could even go the extra mile and make an effort to engage with everyone who comments, likes, shares or retweets your posts. Depending on how big your social accounts are this could be quite time consuming though, but you’d definitely see better results.

2. Target your competitor’s followers.

To find new followers that are relevant to you or your brand it makes sense to look where they may already be residing: in your competitor’s followers list.

Make a list of your main competitors then find their social media accounts, then look through their followers posts and see if there’s anything you can engage with. Don’t be a creep though and like random posts such as “Lovely day out with Grandma”, only engage if it’s relevant – either by liking, sharing or commenting if it seems appropriate.

3. Be careful not to over promote yourself.

I recently had to unfollow a girl on Twitter who was constantly retweeting any conversation she had where someone paid her a compliment. It’s fine to retweet or repost positive comments sometimes, it might even encourage others to want to read your posts or visit your page too which is great! But there are boundaries, and filling up someone’s news feed daily with comments about yourself will make you come across conceited and have them hitting the unfollow button faster than you can say LOVE ME.

4.Never play the follow then unfollow game.

So you might think a quick way of getting your followers up is to just follow as many people as possible hoping they’ll follow you, then unfollowing those who don’t follow back. Well, don’t. People will notice you jumping up and down from following 15000 to 900 people, and judge you for your seedy social tactics.

When you find someone online who has 45k followers but follow 40K back, it instantly loses them all credibility, whilst making you question how they have so much free time on their hands. Why not spend the time you would take following masses of people creating great content instead?

5.Search through related hashtags to find people relevant to you.

Another way of finding followers relevant to you or your brand is to search through posts containing related hashtags. For example, if i’m looking for other fashion bloggers to follow I’ll search for posts containing the hash tag #fbloggers. For the accounts I find that I want to connect with, I’ll then favourite or comment on some of their posts and then only after this I’ll follow them. This creates a more authentic connection rather than just following them straight up, and often leads to a follow back.

6. Always be posting your own interesting and original content.

This probably seems like an obvious one, but you can do all of the tips above until your thumbs are sore and still end up not gaining anything if your social pages don’t contain anything of any real use or interest. Keep updating your social pages with fresh original content to get people sharing and commenting on your posts, and you’ll soon see your follower count increase.

Thanks for reading, what are your best tips for getting more out of social media?